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Hermeneutic Conditions and the Objective in Heidegger's HEIDEGGER AND THE ETHICS 9 Studia Philosophiae Christianae UKSW 50(2014)1 JUAN P. HERNáNDEz HERMENEUTIC CONDITIONS AND THE OBJECTIVE IN HEIDEGGer’s BEING AND TIME Abstract. For several years an interesting debate has unfolded regarding the extent to which Heidegger’s thinking in Being and Time can be classified as either idealist or realist, or rather, and for many this is Heidegger’s official stance, as an attempt to overcome the presuppositions that give rise to these doctrines. One way of considering the debate regards the question as to whether the conditions of intelligibility or, as Taylor Carman calls them, the ‘hermeneutic conditions,’ that Being and Time lays out, are to be understood as access conditions to, or as metaphysical conditions of, entities. The first but not the second interpretation is compatible with a realist reading of Being and Time. For many, including me, the realist reading is the most satisfactory one, both exegetically and theoretically. Several attempts at working out a way of making sense of the transcendental conditions as access conditions have been made, starting with Dreyfus’s and Spinosa’s widely discussed paper. A very important contribution to the debate is owed to Taylor Carman’s excellent Heidegger’s Analytic, where he makes a case for a full-blooded realist reading of Heidegger’s early work. I will argue, however, that Carman’s reading is not completely successful in making sense of the conditions of intelligibility as access conditions rather than metaphysical conditions. I will present a general diagnosis of Carman’s impasse and argue that it results from a thought that has no hold in Heidegger’s way of thinking. Key words: Heidegger, realism, hermeneutic conditions, Carman, objectivity Juan Pablo Hernandez Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, [email protected] Facultad de Filosofia Edificio 95, Manuel Briceño, Piso 6, Carrera 5, no. 39-00, Bogota, Colombia 10 JUAN P. HERNÁNDEZ [2] I For several years an interesting debate has unfolded regarding the ex- tent to which Heidegger’s thinking in Being and Time can be classified as either idealist or realist, or rather, and for many this is Heidegger’s official stance, as an attempt to overcome the presuppositions that give rise to these doctrines. This issue is closely related to the problem of interpreting Being and Time’s transcendental character. As it is well known, in the Introduc- tion to this work Heidegger calls his enterprise a fundamental ontology, which, roughly, he understands as a transcendental philosophy on the a priori conditions for our understanding of being.1 Within this framework, one way of considering the debate regards the question as to whether the conditions of intelligibility or, as Taylor Carman calls them, the ‘herme- neutic conditions,’ that Being and Time lays out, are to be understood as access conditions to, or as metaphysical conditions of, entities.2 The first but not the second interpretation is compatible with a realist reading of Being and Time. For many, including me, the realist reading is the most satisfactory one, both exegetically and theoretically. Several attempts at working out a way of making sense of the transcendental conditions as access conditions have been made, starting with Dreyfus’s and Spinosa’s widely discussed paper.3 A very important contribution to the debate is owed to Taylor Carman’s excellent Heidegger’s Analytic,4 where he 1 M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie, E. Robinson, Harper & Row, New York 1962 / Sein und Zeit, in: Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe, vol. 2, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, Klostermann, Frankfurt a.M. 1978, 31/11, 33–34/13. I follow Macquarrie’s and Robinson’s translation with slight modifications. I use the abbrevia- tion BT in reference to this work, stating first the page number of the English transla- tion followed by the page number of the German edition. 2 See H. Dreyfus, Ch. Spinosa, Coping with Things-in-Themselves: A Practice- Based Phenomenological Argument for Realism, Inquiry 42(1999)1, 49–78, and J. Malpas, The Fragility of Robust Realism: A Reply to Dreyfus and Spinosa, Inquiry 42(1999)1, 89–101. 3 H. Dreyfus, Ch. Spinosa, op. cit., 49–78. 4 T. Carman, Heidegger’s Analytic. Interpretation, Discourse and Authenticity in Being and Time, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge–New York 2003. [3] HERMENEUTIC CONDITIONS AND THE OBJECTIVE 11 makes a case for a full-blooded realist reading of Heidegger’s early work that debunks the most important idealist proposals, i.e. those of Lafont and Blattner,5 and avoids what he correctly identifies as problematic and unnecessary assumptions of Dreyfus’s and Spinosa’s realist reading.6 I will argue, however, that Carman’s reading is not completely suc- cessful in making sense of the conditions of intelligibility – or the her- meneutic conditions, as he calls them7 – as access conditions rather than metaphysical conditions. In the course of his analysis Carman expresses worries that suggest a quasi-Cartesian reflex8 on his part, a reflex which has no place in Heidegger’s thinking. Identifying and dislodging this presupposition is important, for it seems to be shared by other realist readings such as Dreyfus-Spinosa’s and Philipse’s, and allows us to bring the true nature of Heidegger’s realism into relief. I will start by presenting Dreyfus-Spinosa’s realist proposal and Car- man’s reaction to it (section 2). Next (section 3), I will focus on Carman’s worries about the way realism can be accommodated within Heidegger’s philosophy, explain what seems to be the motivation of Carman’s con- cerns, and why such motivation is exegetically ill-founded. Finally (sec- tion 4), I will present a general diagnosis of Carman’s impasse, argue that the diagnosis can also be applied to Dreyfus and Spinosa, and that it is based on a thought that has no hold in Heidegger’s way of thinking. 5 W. D. Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge–New York 1999; Ch. Lafont, Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclo- sure, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2000. Blattner responds to Carman in: W. Blattner, Heidegger’s Kantian Idealism Revisited, Inquiry 47(2004)4, 321–337. For a recent discussion of Lafont’s interpretation, see D. McManus, Heidegger and the Supposition of a Single, Objective World, European Journal of Philosophy (2012). (By the time the present paper was finished, McManus’s paper was only available online). 6 A criticism that in my view applies just as well to more recent realist readings, such as H. Philipse, Heidegger’s ‘Scandal of Philosophy’: The Problem of the Ding an Sich in ‘Being and Time’, in: Transcendental Heidegger, eds. S. Crowell, J. Malpas, Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif. 2007, 169–189. 7 In Carman’s mouth, hermeneutic conditions are not simply conditions of intel- ligibility, but conditions of explicit intelligibility, that is to say, in his view, conditions of interpretation. However, I don’t think this distinction, if warranted, is relevant for the ensuing discussion. 8 I owe this expression to Stephen Mulhall, who used it in discussion. 12 JUAN P. HERNÁNDEZ [4] II Let us start by considering, very briefly, Dreyfus’s and Spinosa’s well- known attempt at finding the foundations of robust realism in Hei- degger’s philosophy.9 This effort derives from the perception of a prob- lem; namely, that in principle Heidegger seems to endorse a form of ‘deflationary realism.’ On Dreyfus’s and Spinosa’s mouth, deflationary realism is the doctrine that we cannot conceive the totality of entities independently of the totality of our practices and vice versa. This posi- tion “makes unintelligible all claims about both things-in-themselves apart from practices and the totality of practices apart from things.”10 In principle, they argue, “Heidegger seems to agree with the deflationary realist that while entities show up as independent of us, the being or intelligibility of entities – what entities are, Joseph Rouse would say – depends on our practices. So any talk of things-in-themselves must be put in scare quotes.”11 For Dreyfus and Spinosa, Heidegger’s apparent endorsement of realism12 “amounts to the seemingly paradoxical claim that we have practices for making sense of entities as independent of those very practices.”13 However, Dreyfus and Spinosa think that in several in- stances Heidegger seems to endorse a robust form of realism, un- derstood as the thesis that entities are independent of all practices of 9 All the quotes to Dreyfus and Spinosa in this section are to this paper. 10 “We cannot make sense of the question whether the totality of things could be independent of the totality of our practices or whether things are essentially dependent on our practices, because to raise these questions meaningfully requires thinking (…) that we can conceive of the totality of things, and the totality of practices with suf- ficient independence from each other to claim that one is logically prior”. H. Dreyfus, Ch. Spinosa, op. cit., 252. Dreyfus and Spinosa find this doctrine exemplified by Da- vidson, a point I cannot take issue with here. The point is discussed in J. Malpas, op. cit., 89–101. 11 H. Dreyfus, Ch. Spinosa, op. cit., 253. 12 The relevant passage is: “What-is [Das Seiende] is, quite independently of the experience by which it is disclosed, the acquaintance in which it is discovered, and the grasping in which its nature is ascertained”. BT, 228/183. 13 H. Dreyfus, Ch. Spinosa, op. cit., 254; my italics. [5] HERMENEUTIC CONDITIONS AND THE OBJECTIVE 13 making them intelligible. And so they formulate the following prob- lem: “How can Heidegger have it both ways? Does the real exist and has properties in itself or only ‘in itself,’ relative to our background practices?”14 In response to this question they purport to show 1) that for Heidegger it is possible to make sense of the Dasein-independence of entities, and therefore, that such possibility is not incoherent; and 2) that Heidegger has resources, which he never completely exploited, to make a case for robust realism in science, i.e., the thesis that science can gain access to entities as they are in themselves.
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